"He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and force of magic."

Emerson

"Nature is a Wizard"

Thoreau

"There are hidden powers in man which are capable of making a God of him on earth."

-Helena Blavatsky

"Your Christianity must have magic in it; your magic must be Christian!"

-Joseph Needleman

"No dog would endure such a curst existence!

Wherefore, from Magic I seek assistance,

That many a secret perchance I reach

Through spirit-power and spirit-speech,

And thus the bitter task forego

Of saying the things I do not know,-

That I may detect the inmost force

Which binds the world, and guides its course;

Its germs, productive powers explore,

And rummage in empty words no more!"

-Goethe's Faust

It is not less absurd, then strange, to see how some Men

....will not forebeare to ranke True Magicians with

Conjurors, Necromancers, and Witches....who insolently

intrude themselves into Magick, as if Swine should enter

into a faire and delicate Garden, and, (being in League with the Devill) make use of his assistance in their

workes, to counterfeit and corrupt the admirall wisdome

of the Magi betweene whom there is as large a difference

as between Angels and Devils."

-Elias Ashmole: Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum

"Beavers build dams, birds build nests, ants excavate, but they have no magic, just as they have no science or religion."

-Lynn Thorndike

A History of Magic and Experimental Science

"My testimonial is that magic is alive in hyperspace."

-Terrance McKenna

"If two of the primary objects of ceremonial magic are to converse with angels and to know the hidden causes of things, then.....Swedenborg was every inch a magician."

-Joscelyn Godwin

"Exalted to the lofty height, we shall measure there from all things that are and shall be and have been in indivisible eternity; and, admiring their original beauty, full of divine power, we shall no longer be ourselves but shall become he Himself Who made us...For he who knows himself in himself knows all things, as Zoroaster first wrote. When we are finally lighted in this knowledge, we shall in bliss be addressing the true Apollo on intimate terms....And restored to health, Gabriel 'the strength of God,' shall abide in us, leading us through the miracles of Nature and showing us on every side the merit and the might of God."

Pico Mirandola

"While contemporary scholars agree that Neo-Platonism had a profound impact on early Christianity and even recognize that Greek and Judeo-Christian thought are indebted to Zoroastrian thought in some ways, they reject the idea of a literal Hermetic tradition as the common origin was widespread and played a central role in the self-understanding of Christianity and, as we shall see, in the formation of modern thought. Indeed, unless one recognizes the importance of this Hermetic tradition, it is very difficult to make sense of the origins of modernity."

-Michael Allen Gillespie

The Theological Origins of Modernity

"What then was Hermeticism? Hermes Trismegistus was thought to have been the voice of ancient Egyptian wisdom. He supposedly taught not merely Moses and through him the Jews and the Christians but also Orpheus and thus the Greeks, including Pythagoras and (indirectly) Plato. The work of Hermes and other ancient wisdom texts such as the Chaldean Oracles, along with the Jewish Kabala, were thought to be the source of Jewish and Christian Scripture. In order to revive a more genuine Christianity, it thus seemed important to understand this origin and to use it in the interpreting the Bible."

_Michael Allen Gillespie

The Theological Origins of Modernity

"Every generation recasts magic in its own likeness. To the Romans, famous for their once religious tolerance but frequently hard pressed politically, it was treated as any other political risk such as poisoning, murder, rebellion, and so on. To Christians., during their period of expansion it was treated as a religious threat. Anything that did not fit into the norm of the world as it should be was "magic."

-Alan Axelrod

The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders

"I see myself to be the All. I am in heaven and in earth, in water and in air; I am in beasts and plants; I am a babe in the womb, and one that is not yet conceived, and one that has been born; I am present everywhere."

Hermes Trismegistus

Asclepius

"Magicians are careful explorers of nature, only directing what nature has formerly prepared, uniting actives to passives and often succeeding in anticipating results so that these things are popularly felt to be miracles when they are really no more than anticipations of natural operations."

-Cornelius Agrippa 1526

"Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and wizards who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?"

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"The miraculous birth of Jesus, accompanied by the portent of the star and the homage of the Magi; the portent at his baptism in the Jordan; the miracles of healing, calming the wind and sea, walking on water and providing supernatural quantities of food and drink; the ability to restore the dead to life; the portents at the Crucifixion, his mysterious disappearance from the tomb and his reappearances after death; the story of his descent into the underworld; these marvels, which helped to persuade Christians that Jesus was divine, could be represented as the achievements of a magician. His power to cast out evil spirits had caused his enemies among the Jews to accuse him of black magic."

Richard Cavendish

A History of Magic

"As long as good uses outweigh the abuses there is no good case for banning a technology-and this applies to magic. It is a technology as old as mankind and will last as long as mankind. This is because it is the science and art of the human imagination, and as long as we have imagination, we shall have magic. The right use of the imagination can bring many deep and lasting benefits, and might even prove a key to our survival, "'

Gareth Knight

A History of White Magic

"Magic is in disrepute. In the mind of modern man if signifies conjurers at children's parties, witchdoctors in darkest Africa, or the fairies and wizards of popular folk-lore. If these images are rejected, then magic is associated with the more sinister novels of Dennis Wheatley and 'Black magic' is assumed to cover the whole field. Indeed, modern man thinks of magic, if he thinks of it at all, as something essentially sinister and malign. emphasize the sensational, morbid Books on the subject tend to aspects of magic. An objective, disinterested examination of the subject is hard to find. Unless we approach the subject as objectively and as disinterestedly as possible, however, we shall almost certainly pre-judge it and condemn it out of hand, and this will be unfortunate, for there is more to it than we might suppose, and-providing we become clear about its nature and its limitations-we shall find it a profounder, and possibly healthier subject that we had imagined."

The Christ, Psychotherapy

and Magic by Anthony Duncan

Helios Books

"The outstanding question is this: why is it that although magic originally occupied the pinnacle of excellence in the judgment of all the ancient philosophers and was always held in the highest veneration by those great sages and priests of antiquity, subsequently (from the beginning of the rise of the Catholic Church) it became an object of hatred and suspicion to the holy Fathers, and was as last hissed off the stage by the theologians, condemned by the sacred canons and, in the end, outlawed by the judgment of all laws?

Cornelius Agrippa 1533

"Magic is an art or technique which by using the power in creation rather than a supernatural power produces various things of a marvelous and unusual kind, the reason for which escapes the senses and ordinary comprehension."

Martin del Rio

Disquisitions on Magic (1608)

"Research consistently shows that not only does belief in the paranormal persist in spite of increases in education, but that acceptance of the possibility of such phenomena as extrasensory perception, remote viewing (clairvoyance), telekinesis (mind over matter), astral projection (out -of-body experiences), telepathy, all manner of divination techniques, and a host of other paranormal phenomena is greater at the extreme ends of the intelligence scale-that is, among the most intelligent members of society (to whom this work is addressed)-and the less gifted."

W. Adam Mandelbaum

The Psychic Battlefield: A History of the Military-Occult Complex

"It is interesting indeed, why in our scientific times, there should be such a pogrom that victimizes our species' superpowers of bio-mind with its marvelous spectrum of sentiency. It may be that someone somewhere, doesn't want that marvelous spectrum to be identified and developed."

Ingo Swann

"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men."

C.S. Lewis

The Abolition of Man

"Magic is the science and art of causing changes to occur in

conformity with will."

Aleister Crowley

"What then is , is the Secret Doctrine but....the kinship of the soul with God....Now to accept this faith as mere philosophy is one thing, but to realize it as an experience of the innermost hearts is another and a deeper thing. No man knows the Secret Doctrine until it has become the secret of his soul, the reigning reality of his thought, the inspiration of his acts, the form and colour and glory of his life."

Joseph Fort Newton

The Builders (1918)

"The word "magic" is out of fashion though its spirit as never more widely diffused that at the present time. Thanks to the gradual debasement of the verbal currency, it suggests to the ordinary reader the production of optical illusions and other parlor tricks. It has dragged with it in its fall the terrific verb to "conjure," which, forgetting that it once undertook to compel the spirits of men and angels, is now content to produce rabbits from top hats."

-Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism

"Magic is the science and art of causing changes in consciousness

to occur in conformity with will."

Dion Fortune

"Magic is all that interests me."

Salvador Dali

Magic is not sorcery but supreme wisdom."

Paracelsus

"What we all too often imagine when we think of magic is the wizard standing inside a pentangle, with his pointed cap and a wand, summoning up a demon. We usually assume, in such imaginative scenarios, that the demon will be invested with supernatural powers and that by merely extending a hand he can shoot bolts of force out of his fingers that simply kill, or perhaps completely transmute something, or perhaps turn something invisible-you name it, these bolts of force can do it at the demon's whim. If you were able to present such a scenario to a contemporary of Bacon's, he or she would be utterly perplexed as to how you came up with such unbelievably crazy ideas. He or she would also be very worried about the prospects for your eternal soul."

For pre-modern thinkers, only God could perform supernatural acts. He could, of course, supernaturally arrange for priests, preparing for the mass, to be able to perform supernatural acts too, but nobody or nothing could perform supernatural acts by their own power. To imagine that they could was to deny God's superiority and was, therefore, a dreadful blasphemy. it was especially true that demons, including the Devil himself, had no supernatural powers. They, like you and me, were creatures of God, and as created beings they were part of the natural world. What's more, although God might temporarily allow an Angel some supernatural power, he would never allow this for a fallen angel, a demon."

John Henry

Knowledge is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision inspired Francis Bacon to create Modern Science

"The science of the augur and the harspex (seer or diviner) was not so foolish as our modern science of political economy. If the hot liver of the victim cleared the soul of the haruspex, and made him capable of that ultimate inward attention which alone tells us the last thing we need to know, then why quarrel with the haruspex?
To him, the blood was conscious: he thought with his heart. To him, the blood
was the red and shining stream of consciousness itself. Hence to him, the liver
that great organ where the blood struggles and "overcomes death", was an object
of profound mystery and significance. It stirred his soul and purified his
consciousness; and it was also his victim. So he gazed into the hot liver, that
was mapped out in fluids and regions like the sky of stars; but these fields and
regions were those of the red, shining consciousness that runs through the whole
animal creation. And therefore it must contain the answer to his own bloody question."

D.H. Lawrence

Etruscan Places

"Paracelsus'sanswer when asked, "What is magic?" It is that which can bring heavenly power into the medium and perform its operation in the same."

Heinrich Schiperges

"Paracelsus and his Followers"

"Every solid in the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of the mind, and the power to flex it is the measure of the mind."

Emerson

"Magic has existed among all peoples and at every period."

Hegel

"The magic incantation is in short, the oddest fact in the history of
civilization! Although the magician chants without thought of aesthetic form or an artistically appreciative audience, yet his spell contains in embryo all that later constitutes the art of music."

Lynn Thorndike

A History of Magic and experimental Science

"An essential element of magic is that it cannot be egalitarian."

James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg

"What have I heard! God,

What have I seen.

Is it fantasy? Fact?

Is it true?"

Wagner

The flying Dutchman

"Our fellow men are the black magicians, think for a moment. Can you deviate from the path that they've lined up for you? No. Your thoughts and actions are fixed forever in their terms. I, on the other hand, brought you freedom. Freedom is expensive, but he price is not impossible. So fear your captors, your masters, Don't waste your time and your power fearing me."

Don Juan

Tales of Power

"I was struck then, as I never ceased to be struck every time I met Orage, by the intense intellectuality that radiated from every part of his being, particularly, of course, his eyes. A curious disparity between the latter, whether in their pigmentation or form, only served to enhance the uncanny expression of resolute and penetrating wizardry, which always suffused his face when he was speaking."

Anthony Ludovici

"His (Orage's) Gospel, always preached with his tongue in his cheek, that every man and woman should do precisely what He or She desires, acted like heady wine on the gasping and enthusiastic young ladies who used to sit in rows worshipping him. They wanted to all kinds of terrible things, and as Orage, backed by "that great German," Nietzsche, had sanctioned their most secret desires, they were resolved to begin at once their career of license."

Gerald Cumberland (Leeds Art Club 1904 England)

"I saw the Man.

His figure reached from earth to heaven and was clad in a purple mantle. He stood deep in foliage and flowers and his head, on which was the head-band of an initiate, seemed to disappear mysteriously in infinity.

Before him on a cube-shaped altar were four symbols of magic-The scepter, the cup, the sword and the pentacle.

His right hand pointed to heaven, his left to earth. Under his mantle he wore a white tunic girded with a serpent swallowing its tail.

His face was luminous and serene, and when his eyes met mine, I felt that he saw the most intimate recesses of my soul. I saw myself reflected in his as in a mirror and in his eyes I seemed to look upon myself.

And I heard a voice saying:

-Look, this is the GREAT MAGICIAN!"

P.D. Ouspensky (St Petersburg,1913)

"Newton.was the last of the magicians´┐Ż.Why do I call him a magician?
Because he looked at the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a
secret that could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence. Certain
mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosophers treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the heavens.partly in certain papers were to be found partly in the heavens.partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren´.By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.."

John Maynard Keynes (The Royal Society, Newton Tercentenary celebration, 1947)

"In speaking of Magic we refer to a fundamental process willed, conscious action. Art as magic serves its supreme function when it leads an entire collectivity into a new realm of consciousness. When a man's creative actions and Art forms are capable of doing just this we are no longer dealing with Art but with Magic. And that Magic is all the greater and more powerful which involves and is the participatory creation of an ENTIRE COMMUNITY. Such is the case with the Gothic Cathedral, the finest rugs of Afghanistan, and the ritual observances of those people in tune with the creative forces of Denture."

Mandala

"If you take any activity, any art, any discipline,

any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go,

push it beyond where it has ever been before,

push it to the wildest edge of edges,

then you force it into the realm of magic."

-Tom Robbins

The MAGICIAN is not just the juggler who performs tricks for an audience. Rather he is an adept who is aware of and can use laws and principles which ordinary man cannot use. He can change his level of consciousness to both higher and lower.. .For only to a magician is the universe forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change. Only he knows that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from THIS UNIVERSAL TENSION THAT HE DRAWS HIS POWER. " '

Peter Beagle

"Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced,,

Hugo Von Hofmansthal

Hofmannsthal

i

The marriage of K'an and Li is the secret magical process

which produces the NEW MAN. uniting within himself the

two spheres .

"Magic thought is not an inarticulate form of pseudo science. It is not just a beginning or a modest attempt at scientific thought but a vast, well articulated mental system, comparable in every respect with that of modern science, except for its inferiority in practical results."

Amaury de Riencourt

Sex and Power in History

"With the rise of scientific rationalism in the seventeenth century, the Mandala principle fades from the screen of the conscious collective activities of the west, the rise of rational and seemingly anti-magical art and consciousness is itself magic."

Mandala

"If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons of our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is no reason to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger enchantment, a far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people of ancient times, or that men can still do so where the old order of life remains unbroken. Why should not the scholar-Gypsy cast his spell over his friends? Why should not Saint Patrick, or he of whom the story was first told, pass his enemies, he and all his clerics, as a herd of deer? Why should not enchanters like him in the 'Morte d' Arthur' make troops of horse seem but grey stones? Why should not the Roman soldiers, though they came of a civilization which was ceasing to be sensitive to these things, have trembled for a moment before the enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why should not the Jesuit father, or the Count Saint-Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of, have really seemed to leave the Gates at once? Why should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh have made their staffs, as the medicine-men of many primitive peoples make theirs of old rope, seem like devouring serpents? Why should not that mediaeval enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to break forth in middle winter?"

Yeats

Enchantment is the enduring of terror and magic

"Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me. .. ."

Marlowe's Dr. Faustus

"Where there is magic there is no death. "

Joseph Campbell

"The following legend of how Magic came to the Jews. Two angels (Uzza and Azael) one of them adopted later by the pagan Arabs as a God, and the other an angel, were sent by God to tempt mortals , as a test of human frailty. Being themselves overcome by love for a woman , they were condemned to divine punishment. The one hangs from the heavens, head downwards, the other lies chained beyond the dark mountains: he it was incidentally who taught women to paint their faces!"

Robert Graves

"And what is magic if not lost wisdom?" It is as if the Western world has willfully denied a rich heritage of magic, scorning its precepts and ridiculing its truths. But the light from the past beckons and the riches are there waiting to be reclaimed.

Magical & Mystical Sites

Europe and the British Isles

Elizabeth Pepper & John Wilcock

Harper & Row

"The magician' s underwear had just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami

Tom Robbins

Another Roadside Attraction

"Much that is done technically .in our time is in no way better than black magic. "

"With us in the West, wakefulness, for some mysterious reason, comes and goes . Our understanding fires up briefly but invariably fades again. Sometimes I suspect that I am myself under a frightful hypnotic influence--I do and do not know the evils of our times. I experience or suffer this alternate glowing and fading in my own person, and I see that others are subject to it. I know Auschwitz and the Gulag, Biafra and Bangladesh, Buenos Aires and Beirut, but when I come back to facts anew I find myself losing focus. Then I begin against reason to suspect the influence of a diffusing power--a demonic will that opposes our understanding: I am forced to consider whether Western Europe and the United States may not be under the influence of a great evil, whether we do not go about " lightly chloroformed."

Saul Bellow

Journey to Jerusalem

VIKING

"Most people are only a very little alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility; it is only when they are so awakened that they are capable of real Good, but that at the same they become first capable of Evil. "

"Between the violently conflicting impulses of the human souls and those, no doubt, of the collective unconsciousness, tragedies are being enacted of which contemporary historians are not, and even it would seem, do not wish to be fully aware, as if they were afraid to focus attention on certain documents and certain interpretations for fear of depriving large sections of the population of their sleep."

Pauwels & Bergier

"The power to rule over men through the evil magic of gold

could only be wielded by a person who had renounced love: not

only romantic love, but love of one 's fellow man, and love as

a symbol of all beneficent creative activity."

He who the power

of love foreswears

from all delights

of love forebears,

the magic he alone can wield

to forge a ring from the gold."

Wagner

The Ring of the Niebelung

Merlin becomes Clinschor's opposite number in the "black" versus "white" magic system. Black magic suggest using the psychic forces of self and nature to manifest and fulfill the ego's appetites, grasping powers to improve the self's environment. Power, of any kind does not lead to enlightenment and applied without insight into the harmonious nature of self and universe is essentially destructive. This is one of Parsival's major discoveries."

"Now Vivian behold all that Merlin had accomplished and she went unto him and kneeled down upon the ground before him and took his hand and set it to her lips. And while she kneeled thus , she said, "Master, this assuredly is the most wonderful thing in the world."

The Story of King Arthur and his Knights

Howard Pyle

"He had always known that in his magical operations he was not quite White, but just a little Grey. He had not used his powers for self-advancement or personal aims, but almost unwittingly he still allowed his own deep-rooted passions and convictions to influence him. For example, he did not regard the Nazis from an entirely detached point of view, as a menace to the welfare of mankind; he 'hated' them, with all the hatred with which his virile personality was capable; and that was wrong. Perhaps it was because of that slight uncertainty of his own powers that in his magical operations he had always followed the rituals of the text-books and utilized such things as garlic, asafoetida grass, crucifixes, horseshoes and many other symbols. These things in themselves were, he knew, only focuses to attract power; they had not an atom of power in themselves but were just bundles of herbs or pieces of wood and iron. A pure White magician, confident in his own strength, would have despised them and relied entirely upon his own will. Without any of these things, or pentacles, or mumbled phrases from ancient mysteries, he would have gone , fearless and alone from his body on to the astral to give battle. In that strange moment all things were made clear to the Duke. He had been a coward. He had shirked the conflict when he should have gone out to fight, relying alone upon the intrinsic fact that light is more powerful than darkness."

Denis Wheatley

Strange Conflict

"So the Magus marries earth to heaven, that is to say the forces of inferior things to the gifts and properties of supernatural things."

Pico Della Mirandola

"Why is Love called a Magus? Because all the force of magic consists in Love. The work of Magic is a certain drawing of one thing to another by natural similitude. The parts of this world, like members of one animal, depend all on one Love, and are connected together by natural communion. . .From this community of relationship is born the communal Love: from which Love is born the common drawing together: and this is the true Magic. "

Ficino

"Behold now, standing before you, the man who has pierced the air and penetrated the sky, wended his way amongst the stars and over passed the margins of the world, who has broken down those imaginary divisions between spheres-the first, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth or what you will-which are described in the false mathematics of blind and popular philosophy. By the light of sense and reason, with the key of most diligent inquiry, he has thrown wide those doors of truth which it is within our power to open and stripped the veils and covering from the face of nature."

Giordano Bruno

"The Magician has power in this Mystery" to act according to his will, and can do what he pleases. But he must be armed in that element wherein he would create; else he will be cast out as a stranger, and given into the power of the spirits thereof, to deal with him according to their desire. Of which in this place no more is to be said, because of the turba ."

*Mysterium magnum is nothing else than

the hiddenness of the Deity

Jacob Boehme

"Look at this wand. With it you may have dominion over the solid

earth. Strike the hard rock, and it will fly open. Beat the ground

with it, thus "and she struck the earth thrice in a singular manner-

"and the firm floor of the world shall rock."

(The Enchantress to St. George

"Magic has an ugly name to those who have seen black magic at work among primitive peoples. Others think that it is completely bogus and no such power exists. But magic is simply the use of powers of the mind which are not as yet understood by science. Magic and miracle are the same thing."

T.C. Lethbridge

Witches

"The task which you have undertaken, 0 Filoteo, is a most unusual and difficult one, for you wish to lead men out of their abyss of blindness into the clear and tranquil light of those stars, which we now see scattered over the dusky-blue mantle of heaven in all their beautiful variety."

Giordano Bruno

"This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our ART is said and is done either for good, or for evil, Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!"

Ursula K. Le Guin

A Wizard of EarthSea

"Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light"

Ursula K. Le Guin

"A Wizards power of changing and of summoning can shake the balance of the world, It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must call knowledge, and sure need, To light a candle is to cast a shadow."

Ursula K. Le Guin

"To obtain magical Power, learn to control thought. Admit only true ideas which are in harmony with the end desired."

Israel Regardie

"Magical systems are highly elaborate metaphors, not truths. When we say "There are twelve signs in the Zodiac , " what we really mean is "we will view the infinite variety of human characteristics through this mental screen, because with it we will gain insights;" just as when we say "there are eight notes in the musical scale." we mean that out of all possible range and variations of sounds, we will focus on those that fall into these particular relationships, because by doing so we are making music."

StarHawk

Spiral Dance

"All, therefore, that is conducive to human sensitivity and to increased awareness is the work of the White Magician."

Alice Bailey

"Merlin typifies the individual who enters the Way of Attainment impelled only by an eager thirst for knowledge. Such a one Will devote every available moment to reading and study neglecting all opportunities to give of himself in love and serving for others. Inevitably his narrow-ness of outlook brings about a one-sided development which can end only in sorrow and disillusionment. Saint Paul refers to the unillumined intellect as "the power of darkness." The aspirant who is working for well-rounded will for each important occult truth that he learns give of himself anew in loving, self-forgetting service for the betterment of some one of God's creatures. If mind and heart are working equally together, the fate of Merlin will be an impossibility."

Corinne Heline

Mysteries of the Holy Grail

"But no historical net, no examination of trends or influences, no psychological analysis, may ever quite serve to catch or to identify this extraordinary man, Giordano Bruno, the Magus of Memory. "

"With untiring industry he adds wheels to wheels, piles memory rooms on memory rooms. With endless toil he forms the innumerable images which are to stock the systems; endless are the systematic possibilities and they must all be tried. . . . "

Frances A Yates

The Art of Memory

"Men of rare spirit who have in them something of the hermetic and the divine, will climb the hill of difficulty and wring from harsh circumstance the palm of immortality. And though you may never reach the winning post nor gain the prize, cease not to run the race. "

Giordano Bruno

"The last word is with the philosopher who maintains against Aristotle, and with Hermes Trismegistus, that the earth moves because it is alive."

Giordano Bruno

They tell me, too, some oriental conjurer

Has come from Lydia, a magician with golden hair

Flowing in scented ringlets, his face flushed with wine,

His eyes lit with the charm of Aphrodite; and he

Entices young girls with his Bacchic mysteries"

And then I have you body and soul.

Fate has given this man a spirit

Which is always pressing onwards, beyond control,

And whose mad strivings overleaps

All joys of the earth between pole and pole.

Him shall I drag through the wilds of life

And through the flats of meaninglessness,

I shall make him flounder and gape and stick

And to tease his insatiableness

Hang meat and drink in the air before his watering lips;

In vain he will pray to slake his inner thirst,

And even had he not sold himself to the devil

He would be equally accursed."

MEPHISTOPHELES IN Goethe's Faust )

"Magic is the process of producing visible, physical results determined upon by the trained will-thought of the magician who has found the way to communicate with the appropriate angelic Intelligences and win their collaboration. Magic has therefore been described as the power to address the gods in their own tongues. "

Geoffrey Hodson

"Magic give me vitality. It feeds me. It makes me constantly aware of change. It makes me constantly aware that I'm part of this universe and everybody else is part of it too. I actually do feel like I am the Great Mother. I feel like I am the earth. I'm sea, I'm everything feminine. And the priest and priestesses before me-as I look into their eyes and they look into my eyes, there is a most incredible openness that one doesn't find in the mundane world. We can only experience that within the sacredness of a ritual where we have worked to invoke the meters within ourselves, opening ourselves to learning. And as they kneel in front of me during the Full Moon, I have this feeling of being dissolved and being part of them, and of them being a part of me, and of everything dissolving, all of Nature-everything dissolving around us, all of us becoming one."

Levanah

"God is alive, magic is afoot."

Buffey Sainte-Marie

"The art of magic is the art of worshipping God."

Sir Walter Raleigh

"We are living in a time of major magic. When you are open to magic, you'll meet others all the time who share that openness. Magic comes to people who don't need to be in control all the time, people who remain open to experiencing ,to allowing their own process. Have you noticed the times when you talk with another person and end up on the theme, "Look at what just happened in my life-isn't it incredible!" Simply sharing magical experience ferments magic. Don't name it, just live it and people will feel it in you. It's a sense of excitement and adventure that comes with allowing life to flow through you, Love to love through you; it is the action of inaction, the working of the TAO As Lao Tze put it, we do without doing, and all things are done. For that is the will of heaven, and the source of endless magic. Energy. follows thought, and the need to control, to make it "right", is what exiles magic from our lives. Trust your Knowing Self and the Magic will flow."

Ralph Blum

The Book of Runes

The Return of Magic

"Rest with me and remember again

The passage of magic from our realm

Long ago, banished by barbarians.

Grieve for our ages in an empty world

Of brittle sky and hard thin earth;

We should but weep and turn again away

Had we not just seen glimmer

The olden glow's grainy lustre

Flicker soft where one passed walking-

And had seen others seeing.

It is enough-for magic has returned

Secretly we smile, knowing,

And with one breath

Wash away our empty interlude

Full only of initiation,

And rest in light together

Far from cold mid-winter memories

Of circled figures on barren moors

Waiting for the sun

it is enough-for magic has returned."

by Loyd Meeker

"Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic."

Melville

Moby Dick

"All the magical operations consist in freeing one's self From the coils of the Ancient Serpent then to place the foot on its head, and lead it according to the operator's will."

Levi

"No one is a sorcerer every hour of the day. How could you live?"

Pablo Picasso

Tales of Power

"There is a mysterious connection between gods and numbers."

Pythagoras

"The object of Magic then, is the return of man to the gods."

'The stars breathe out their luminous souls and attract

their radiance from one another."

Paracelsus

"Ignoramuses! We foresaw life beyond the tomb like life on earth, with the same joys and pleasures. We did not realize that life is only a trial for the soul and that the physical body is its prison. By binding the soul to its mummy, we have imprisoned it eternally.

I was one of these vain imbeciles! I was a priest and a magician. I boasted of my knowledge and numerous were the victims I similarly bound for eternity. Thus I did in my turn and remain bound to the earth without hope, undergoing nameless sufferings. This is the true meaning of hell, and man created it himself by hobbling his destiny."

-Enel's Gnomology

SHAMINISM

"A shaman is a man (or woman) who knows how to deal with spirits and influence them. He is thus a magician. Every Shaman is a magician, but not every magician is a shaman. A magician may also be a sorcerer. The essential characteristic of the shaman is his excitement, his ecstasy and trancelike condition. It is because so many scholars have applied the word shaman to the magicians of primitive tribes, who are usually sorcerers and nothing more, that the idea of
shamanism has becomes so vague and distorted."

Ivar Lissner

Man,God and Magic

"Shamanism involves no religious beliefs, no religious rites and-last but not least-no god.
Shamanism is a form of activity designed to cure disease, and cattle epidemics, ascertain the truth or the future and maintain communication with souls and spirits. Thus, although Peter Wilhelm Schmidt rightly points out that it has infiltrated into the religions of most Turko-Tatar herdsmen and hunters,
shamanism as a religion by itself does not exist."

Ivar Lissner

Ibid

"Shamanism is immensely ancient, and goes back far into the pre-history of mankind, if, as I believe, the magician of the Trois-Freres cave was a genuine shaman, shaminism must be at least twenty-five thousand years old and probably far older. Since humanity survived for six hundred thousand years without the benefits of modern medicine, shaminism is a much more ancient branch of knowledge. It is an older and greater mystery, a thing linked with magic and thus closer to the sky, the universe and the truths that defy human comprehensions."

Ivar Lissner

Ibid

"Any student of magic who reaches beyond the superficial levels so profusely available in publications will have realized that magic is somehow concerned with genetics. Our ancestors, from who we inherit our magic as well as our physical characteristics, were most concerned to perpetuate certain blood lines that held special abilities. If the Grail legends are considered in this light, they are found to be replete with indications of genetic magic, especially aimed at spiritual regeneration attuned to physical regeneration."

John Matthews

At the Table of the Grail

"Paracelsus' answer when asked, "What is magic?" It is that which can bring heavenly power into the medium and perform its operation in the same."

Heinrich Schiperges

Paracelus and His Followers"

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Book: "The Foundations of High Magick" by M. Denning & O. Phillips

Book: "W.B. Yeats: A Life" 2-vol by R.F. Foster

Book: "The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary" by Karl von Eckharthausen

"The History of Magic in the Modern Age", by Nevill Drury

Book: "Don Juan, Mescalito and Modern Magic: The Mythology of Inner Space" by Neville Drury

Book: "Savage Theory: Cinema As Modern Magic" by Rachel O. Moore

Book: "The Dark Side of History" by M. Edwardes

Book: "Sexuality, Magic & Perversion" by Francis King

Book: "The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works" by Roger Highfield

Book: "The Occult: The Ultimate Book for Those Who Would Walk with the Gods" by Colin Wilson

Book: "The Magic Circle of Rudolf II" by Peter Marshall

Book: "The Psychic Battlefield: A History of the Military-Occult Complex" by W. Adam Mandelbaum

Book: "The Queen's Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I" by Benjamin Woodley

Book: "Pythagoras' Trousers" by Margaret Wertheim

Book: "The Philosophy of Magic" by Arthur Versluis

Book: "The Geography of Witchcraft" by Montague Summers

Book: "A History of Magic and Experimental Science" by Lynn Thorndike

Book: "Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance" by Edgar Wind

Book: "Magic and Witchcraft: From Shamanism to the Technopagans" by Nevill Drury